I am standing in the window of the tower at an artist’s colony in upstate New York, and I am looking down at the fountain behind the mansion because I can think of nothing to write today. That’s why I’m here, I’m supposed to be writing.
The man is walking toward the fountain, and the sky is blue. He stops at the wall and looks at the sculpture of two nude nymphs and a satyr that lies against the woods under the mountain.
In his pressed white jacket the man leaves the fountain, and the sky is still blue. The man stops beneath me on the lawn. He is waiting. The wall stops as well and surrounds the white sculpture of two nude nymphs and the satyr who lie beside the woods under the mountain. In the other rooms of the mansion people are writing things, and in the studios on the grounds artists are painting and sculptors are sculpting.
No one is left to look at the fountain, and the sky is less blue. One nymph stands and yawns in the white sculpture of two nudes and a smiling satyr lying beside the woods under the mountain. The first nymph stretches her arms above the fountain, and now the sky is clouding. The other trails her fingers in the green hue of the pool where the nymphs and satyr lie beside the woods beneath the mountain.
Above, I stand in the tower window watching. I should be sitting before my laptop tapping on the keys, listening to the patter of words falling onto the virtual page, but the mist of the water in the fountain is a curtain, and the sky is clouding.
The man in the jacket returns to the sculpture where the two nude nymphs and the satyr lie still beside the woods beneath the mountain. The mist of the water is a curtain, and the sky is cloudy. Now a girl trails her fingers in the aquamarine of the pool where the nymphs and the satyr lie beside the woods by the still mountain, where the man stands looking at the sculpture and at the girl as I stand watching rather than writing in the tower window.
I was driving on the eastern outskirts of Dresden, Maine, coming from Wiscasset, when I saw a sign I'd not seen before that read, "ABE NAKI TRADING POST." Because I love a good trade I stopped and went in where I saw a man standing at the counter. I walked up to him and asked, "Are you Abraham?"
"Abraham?" He replied with a quizzical look in his eyes.
"Yes, ‘Abe.’"
"Who's Abe?"
"Aren't you? I assumed it was short for 'Abraham.' Aren't you Mr. Naki?"
"Mr. Naki! Are you a wise guy or something?"
I was nonplussed. "Me? Why do you say that? You look sort of Japanese to me, at least Asian of some kind. Isn't 'Naki' a Japanese name?"
A change came over him, especially his eyes. "Get the fuck out of my store," he said as he came around the corner of the counter. He picked up a hatchet as he came toward me.
I backed away. "What did I do?"
"Do?" He asked. "Do? You're too stupid to DO anything except misread 'Abenaki,' the name of my tribe, for some Japanese guy named 'Abe Naki.'" As I dived into my car he said, "New York plates! I should'a known," and he kicked my fender as I sped away.
Carl Hutchins found it difficult to believe it was all theirs at last — his and Mary's. They had been planning and saving to purchase seaside property near Pemaquid Point on the Maine coast for nearly a decade, and now at last this lovely spot belonged to them. Perhaps they could not yet quite afford this summer place, but given the state of their marriage, perhaps neither could they not afford it. They had driven from New York State the day before and taken possession.
The July sun shone in the sky and the tide had begun to go out. The low waves broke over a boulder or two and shuffled up to the white sands, spreading out and retreating in a pattern of foam and bright water that it made his heart ache to watch. Carl stood about halfway down the beach. Behind him stood the little Cape with its front door facing the road and the kitchen herb garden abutting a small dune that grew some sparse wild vegetation of its own. There was only a mild breeze, so he could hear Mary through the open window pottering about at the sink. "Lunch will be ready in a minute," she called to him. He turned and smiled at her, waved, then faced back to sea and took in a great lungful of salt air. He began to walk toward the waterline.
It was then that he first noticed it. At first he thought it was a box sitting about halfway down to the water, but when he approached it to get a better look he saw that it was made of brick. "Odd I never noticed this before," Carl said to himself, for he thought he had gone over every inch of this property more than once. He kicked it lightly — its four sides were solid. Carl stooped over and tried to peer into it, but it was inky and the sun didn't seem to penetrate the darkness. He began to stick his hand into it but pulled back. There was no telling what might be down there. Best to be careful.
"Lunch!" Mary called.
Carl turned and walked back to the house. He went in and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. He sat down at the table and Mary served him his sandwich and beer.
"What's up?" she asked.
"Hm?"
She cocked her head at him — she was still what his mother had called "a Titian-haired beauty" — and said, "Your right eyebrow is raised. That means something's up. What is it?" She had a good figure still, despite being just a bit over forty. "Oh, just something out on the beach that I hadn't noticed before." He began to eat.
Mary got her own plate and brought it to the table with a glass of milk. "Anything important?" There was an edge in her voice. "Communicate with me, Carl," she said. Carl shook his head, but not very hard — his hair, what there was of it, hardly moved. "I'll show you after lunch," he said. "We'll need a flashlight."
"What is it?" Mary asked between bites.
"It looks like the top of a chimney, but I don't know." When they had finished and stacked the dishes on the sink counter Mary and Carl went out to look at — and into, for they brought a flashlight — the object that jutted about two feet out of the sand. Carl shone a light down it, but it was much deeper than two feet. He could make out nothing beyond the end of the beam.
"What do you suppose...?"
Carl shrugged in reply. "Beats me," he said at last. "I guess it's nothing," but his right eyebrow was making its quizzical arc again. Mary picked up a pebble and held it over the opening, but before she could drop it Carl said, "Do you smell something?"
Mary paused. "It smells like burning paper," she said. And then they both noticed the wisp of smoke curling out of the object on the beach. "Why, it is a chimney!" she said. She looked up at Carl to see him staring at her with both his eyebrows arched.
"It's impossible, you know," he said. "Nobody could be burning anything down there." But as he spoke a wispy fragment of cobweb-thin carbon rose out of the flue of the chimney, its edge beaded with glowing sparks. He reached out and it landed in the palm of his hand. Just before it disintegrated he thought he could make out writing on it.
"Did it say something?" Mary asked. Nervously she smoothed her jean skirt with both her fine, long-fingered hands. Carl nodded. "What?"
He hesitated. "I couldn't make it out," he said. "Just some letters I think, beginning with an aitch." Mary's clear green eyes stared into his blue ones. "Let's go inside," Carl suggested. "It's beginning to get a little chilly."
Neither of them went out to the beach to look at the chimney in the sand for the rest of that beautiful day which they wasted doing useful things around the house: unpacking, storing things, cleaning up. They wanted to keep busy.
In the evening, which was a typically cool Maine one, they sat before their own fireplace looking at the faces in the flames and listening to the logs crumble into ash. They went to bed early and slept peacefully until early in the morning when Carl's eyes snapped open and he couldn't get them closed again. His restlessness woke Mary.
After breakfast Carl ventured out the kitchen door, stepped down the path through the herb garden and walked out onto the beach which lay glistening beneath another perfect day. He walked past the bricks sticking up out of the sand to the water's edge and contemplated the incoming tide for a few minutes. He scuffed the line of seaweed and flotsam that lay at high water mark, then he walked back and stood before the chimney, his eyebrow arched high on his forehead made even higher by the receding hairline he smoothed with one hand.
And then he heard voices. A woman said, "You never take me anywhere." Carl spun on his heel to look for her, but there was no one in sight, not even Mary. "I never get out of the house." The curiously attenuated voice came from behind him now, but it was a long time before Carl could force himself to turn back to the chimney, and an even longer time before he could make himself believe the conversation came from the flue.
"Where do you want to go?" a man's voice said. "Where is there to go? We have no close friends here yet."
"Even if we did, they'd never come here to see us," she replied. "I'm so bored I could scream. In fact, I think I will."
"Don't you dare," he said. But she did. Carl heard it as he ran back to the house — a sort of half-hearted, tired little scream. Carl burst through the kitchen door and nearly knocked Mary down. Without saying a word he grabbed her arm and ran back out to the beach dragging her after him.
What's the matter?" Mary asked. There was a note of fright in her voice.
"Sshh," Carl said, dropping to his knees before the chimney in the sand. "Listen."
"...nice thing to do," the man was saying. "If anybody heard that they'd think I was beating you."
Mary clamped both hands across her mouth and stifled her own scream.
Carl put his hands on the side of the chimney, leaned forward, bent over the opening of the flue and called, "Hello! Hello!" He was answered by silence.
"What are you doing?" Mary grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and tried to drag him back, but Carl shook himself loose and called again. "Hello down there!" He cocked his head and thought he could hear whisperings beneath him. "Hear that?" he asked Mary.
"It's just the tide coming in," she said.
"The hell it is." He grabbed her hand and pulled her down beside him. "Listen."
But she didn't have to listen very hard. "Where's that voice coming from?" the woman asked, her words trembling up the flue.
"I don't know. It almost sounds like the chimney."
"Hi! We're here!" Carl called. Silence again.
Then, "Who's there? What are you doing on our roof?"
"Oh, my god!" The woman said.
Carl and Mary turned to stare into each other's eyes. They looked quickly away.
"What are you doing down there?" Carl asked.
"Down where? We're not down anywhere," the man said.
"You're up there, on our roof."
"This isn't a roof. This is the beach at Pemaquid." Carl squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again and tried to peer down into the murk, into the cool air rising. He opened his eyes and cupped his hands around his lips. "I'm Carl Hutchins, he called. "My wife Mary is with me. We're kneeling on the sand. Your chimney is sticking up out of our property."
"Must be some kind of a maniac," the woman said in a half-whisper, but her voice was clearer now, as though she were looking up the chimney. "Call the police."
"The phone doesn't work, remember? It's not hooked up yet."
"It's never going to get hooked up, is it?" she asked. "How long has it been?"
"I don't remember," he said.
Mary had crept closer to the chimney on her knees, and she, too, was leaning over it. "Halloo," she said somewhat tentatively.
"There is a woman with him," the man's voice said.
"Two maniacs on our roof! Oh, my god." And then there was silence again.
After a while Carl called, "What are your names?" There was no reply. "We'll come back again," he shouted down the muffling flue. He got to his feet — his legs were cramped, but he helped Mary up before he massaged them and stretched.
"What are we going to do?" Mary asked as he led the way back to the house.
"The sheriff," Carl said as he headed out the door to find a public phone. Mary went with him. They found one they could use at the restored fort. The deputy at the other end of the line was incredulous when he heard what the problem was. "He doesn't believe me," he told Mary as he held his hand over the mouthpiece. "What'll I do?"
"Tell him to come see for himself."
When Carl hung up he said, "They'll be right there by the time we get back home."
"It looks like an old chimney, all right," the deputy said kicking the brick structure. "But there can't be anyone down there." He took off his visored cap and leant over the opening.
"Halloo below!" he called. No sound returned. He picked up a medium-sized pebble and held it over the chimney.
"No, don't!" Carl said. "You might hurt them." The patrolman gave him a funny look and dropped the stone. Mary, Carl and the deputy all heard it hit bottom, but with a sort of muffled noise rather than a sharp sound or a splash. "That's odd — it sounds kind of far down there," the officer said, "I'd've thought we'd hear water. Anyhow, there must have been a house here at one time and this is what's left." He straightened up. "If you heard noises it was the seashore probably." He pulled his jacket down, smoothed it out and turned to leave. "Don't give it another thought," he said as he got into his cruiser and drove away.
"What are we going to do?" Mary asked. Carl went into the house and came back out with two brand new tools, a pick and a spade. He began to dig.
"Don't worry," he called down the shaft of the chimney. "We'll get you out." He thought he heard muffled voices but wasn't sure.
He worked hard while Mary watched. After a half hour he was down three feet below the surface and water was beginning to seep into the hole. He was bending down for another spadeful of sand, so he didn't hear the voice clearly, but Mary was standing over the chimney and she heard it say, "What are you doing up there? Our roof is starting to leak!"
And then the woman's voice — "And it isn't even raining!"
"Carl!" Mary said. "They say their roof is starting to leak."
Her husband looked down at his feet. He had removed his shoes and socks and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans because he was standing in a foot of water. He stuck the spade into the sand and stepped out of the hole he was digging — it abutted the chimney on the northern side.
"Is there a lot of water?" he called down to the people beneath the beach, but there was no reply. "I'll be back," he said to Mary.
"Now where are you going?"
"To Damariscotta to buy a sump pump."
It took Carl the better part of the morning to bring the gear home, rig it, string an electrical line and get it working. Even with the tide coming in the pump did a good job, however, keeping pace with the water rising in the hole. After lunch Carl jumped back into it and began digging again. Now and then Mary brought him a drink and he took a breather, but he rested very little although he wasn't used to all this physical exercise. Still, he played squash back in the city and he jogged some. He wasn't in such bad shape. Some of the women didn't think so, at any rate.
Had there been onlookers present they could have read in Mary's face what progress was being made, for the deeper Carl delved the more furrowed her forehead became beneath the Titian locks, and the deeper her eyes became tinged with green. By suppertime, which she and Carl had both forgotten, Mary's eyes were jade and her husband was all but entirely beneath the surface of the beach even when he stood up.
"I'll need a ladder, Mary," he said peering over the edge of the pit. On two sides of it there was a new dune made of moist sand. "Go get our twelve-foot aluminum extension, will you? It's in the basement. Take it out through the cellar door." She hesitated. "It's not heavy," he said. "I'll be all right."
When he had managed to climb out — the ladder took up more room than one might have thought — he and Mary sat and stared down the six-foot shaft whose sides occasionally gave way in little landslides. The pump motor hummed as evening approached beyond the horizon, though it was still very light out and wouldn't be dark yet for hours. It was shadowy enough in the pit, however, and darker in the chimney in the sand.
"Have they said anything lately?" Carl asked.
Mary shook her head. "Not for a while."
"What was the last thing?"
"I heard the woman say, 'What's that scraping sound?' I called down that you were digging out their chimney and ought to get to the roof soon."
Carl sat silently. He lifted his eyes and stared out to sea. "There is no roof," he said.
"What?" Mary asked. She looked at him and didn't blink.
"Not unless their house is made of stone." Mary continued to stare. "I've hit bedrock," Carl said. "I can't dig any farther."
"Then...," Mary managed to say, "what's down there?" "The chimney stops at the rock. There's nothing down there."
There was silence between them. The combers rustled up to the white beach and frothed toward them. "What are we going to do?" Mary asked. "We can't leave them down there."
Carl stood up and brushed the sand off his jeans. "There's only one thing we can do. I don't know if I can get much of a swing down there," he said as he dropped the pick into the pit and climbed back down.
"Don't," Mary said.
"Pull up the ladder — I'll need all the room I can get," Carl said.
"I don't think you should," Mary said, but she pulled up the ladder.
"Now just listen for them."
It was hard for him to get any kind of swing in the close quarters, but at last he managed a fairly good tunk against the side of the chimney. He paused. "Anything?"
Mary, her head cocked over the flue, said, "I heard the woman say something. I don't know what."
Carl swung again.
"She said, 'Stop.' So did the man."
"Tell them I'll have them out pretty soon." Carl swung again, harder this time. The point caught between two bricks and he wiggled the pick to loosen the mortar.
"'Please stop,' she's saying now. 'You're damaging our house,'" Mary told her husband. "Do stop, Carl. Please." Mary dropped down on her knees and leaned over the pit. Her hands caused a little avalanche of sand. She pulled back a little.
Carl swung again. "I'm getting it!" he said. His mouth was open and he was panting. His hair straggled down over his forehead. Again he swung, and this time a brick came loose.
"They're crying, Carl," Mary said. "Stop! I want you to stop!"
"Don't be ridiculous." He swung again.
"I'll leave you down there, Carl," Mary said. "I'll leave you." But suddenly there was a hole in the side of the chimney.
"Shine the light down!" he called to Mary. Carl saw a little cloud of soot that swirled about in the play of late sunlight on a bed of ash lying at the bottom of the chimney, on a surface of stone. "There's nothing here," he said to Mary, but neither Mary nor anyone else replied. There were only the sounds of the pump and the sea, and then only of the sea and the little slips of sandfalls.
Jasper peered out between the curtains and saw Widow Oliver looking back at him from her window next door. He muttered something under his breath, yanked the curtains back into place, and hauled down the shade. He turned back into the room.
It was so gray inside, all-ways gray, that he couldn't help but get the idea when the page of color rose up off the stack of old magazines and pounced into his eyes. The seams of his face folded upward in delight, and his shaggy eyebrows made two hair arches.
"Grief!" he said. "Wonder I didn't think of it before!"
He walked across the room and picked it up — it was a Burpee seed catalogue. He swiped a film of dust off the cover and saw even more vividly that his idea was a good one. A cluster of flowers radiated out into the room and encased Jasper in an aura of blazing summertime. For a few moments the clammy spring chill of the old house was staved off and Jasper let his mind immerse itself in the brooks and sandlots of his childhood. Then, at last, he shook his head to break the gaze of his eyes and the chain of fragrant images in his head.
A rickety rolltop desk stood nearby in one dim corner of the room, pigeonholes stuffed with yellow letters and faded receipts. He tossed the catalogue down there, opened a drawer, and began to rummage. He found the stub-end of a pencil, an envelope, and a stamp. He sat down, riffled through some pages until he found the order blank, and made out the order. Then he rummaged some more till he found his checkbook. When he had finished he folded the order so it would slide easily into the envelope and then put his return address on it. Gathering up the order, the check, the envelope, and the stamp, he rose and stepped back over to the window, raised the shade, and pulled the curtains wide open.
Cora Oliver was there still, her eyes peeling out over her little goat chin and across Jasper's sash. It took her face a second to register surprise at the old man's unorthodox movements, but Jasper saw it — just a flicker of a lash, maybe, and a tic of her cheek, but his distance vision was good and he saw her reaction. He grinned and planted himself broadside in the frame of the window. Cora couldn't possibly miss a single one of his motions.
Jasper stuck out his tongue. He could sense, more than see, the ice of her indignation begin to work its way up from her dingy dimity bodice into her face, but he held the pose just long enough to raise the envelope slowly, with both hands and from about waist high, the give the flap a thick, deliberate lick. Almost in slow motion he slid the order blank into the envelope and, in part of the same movement, slapped over the flap and made sure it was sealed. Then the stamp — another tonguing, another pasting, and it was done.
He put the envelope down on the sill, address-side aiming into his room so Mrs. Oliver couldn't use her little pair of opera glasses on it, and crossed the room into the hall to get his coat and the tam he wore. He brought his outdoor gear to the window where he shrugged himself into his sleeves and planted the tam on his head. Then — very slowly still — he bent to the envelope, took it, and headed for the front door.
By the time he reached the street Cora Oliver had shifted her lookout and was in the front window, her spindly old ghost of a figure barely discernible behind the gauze mesh of thin drapery. Jasper made believe he hadn't seen her. He chortled and hunched up against the chill April breeze which bunted against him down the street of old homes, once a neighborhood, but now merely a peeling reminder of a distant prosperity.
Though it was still early in the month, Jasper could sense May lurking among the puddles of the walks and along the crabgrass borders of stoops and verandahs. "It wants to break out. You can feel it," he said to himself. A fat man working in his yard overheard Jasper and looked oddly at him, but Jasper didn't recognize him, so he just kept walking and didn't say hello.
Jasper kept looking straight ahead until at the last possible moment he shot a glance back down the street, but he could no longer see Cora Oliver. "She's there, though," he said and stalked on until he reached the corner where the mailbox stood. Jasper pulled open the jaw of the iron box. It snapped once and swallowed. "Just like a fat tin bird," Jasper said and turned toward home.
Each day while he waited for the package to be delivered Jasper sat reading in the window overlooking Old Lady Oliver's yard. He made it an ostentatious performance. He had dragged a rocker over to the window and positioned it in a particular way. It had been a long time since he had enjoyed the sunlight on this side of the house. As he thought about it, he reckoned it up to be three years dating from the day Mrs. Oliver had bought the house next door. "She has the longest nose," he said into the catalogue spread open on his knees. "Near as long as her sight." He turned the page.
Jasper sat so that, no matter how he held the Burpee catalogue, she couldn't make out what it was he was reading. The curtains were drawn wide apart, the shade raised — Jasper would walk into the room at precisely nine in the morning, grab the pull, and let the shade snap up on its roller, with a fanfare of dust the first couple of times., the motes curling down into the streaming sunlight in sheets like a page full of bugle notes. The very first day after mailing the letter, indeed, Jasper had made a magnificent production of washing the window, both inside and out.
After the shade-pulling ceremony, much, he hoped, to his neighbor's confusion, he had removed the curtain, carefully but with flourishes, and disappeared. A few minutes later he had reappeared with a bucket of foaming water and a monstrous car-washing sponge he'd bought down at the hardware store. He had set to work slopping tides of water all over the inside panes until the walls were soaking wet and soil eroded from the glass onto the sill and over onto the floor. He had sloshed and sung in a wobbly baritone all the loud songs he could think of, then set to work wiping up the mess with armloads of toweling. As he worked he could see Widow Oliver exploding out of her window, curiosity and astonishment bulging in her eyes behind the flinty little spectacles she affected — they were made of pure unground crystal, Jasper was sure, and neither hindered nor helped her vision. "What they're for, Jasper informed the silence, "is to catch the light and throw it in the other fellow's eyes." He paused to rest for a moment, disappeared again, then came back and put up new white curtains fringed with flounces.
Then he went back to the kitchen for more supplies. With a sweater pulled on and a stepladder under his arm, Jasper went outside and repeated his performance. He worked until the window shone, regretting not the labor, but only that he couldn't see Mrs. Oliver while his back was to her. When he had finished and gathered up his materials he turned...and nearly dropped everything.
Mrs. Oliver had decided to fight fire with fire. She stood in her window, a cloth in one hand and a bottle of spray cleaner in the other, fogging up the panes and wiping them clean with jerky little motions of her arms, on each of which a single wattle of skin wobbled from armpit to elbow. Not that her window needed cleaning. She always kept it pellucid as a spring-fed pool. "The only one like it in the whole of her scabrous dwelling," Jasper mumbled to himself as he tried to control his surprise. He thought he had controlled his expression fairly well, so he went back inside and took his battle position in the rocker.
Each day was the same. He would sit for a couple of hours with the flinty eyes of his neighbor upon him, pricking and prodding like two little needles. She had, as a matter of fact, decided to escalate the war. Usually she was surreptitious about the use of her opera glasses. Jasper had caught her only a couple of times by kneeling at an upstairs window and looking out from under the bottom edge of the nearly-drawn shade. Her bird-like head, on these occasions, looked as though it had grown little black stalks. "A curious cross between a crow and a lobster,"" Jasper remembered observing, and then he had dropped back into bitter mourning for the window seat she had forced him to abandon.
A few days after Jasper had renewed the fight, though, Cora Oliver had begun using the binoculars openly. She would sit there on her Victorian love seat and move them slowly and deliberately up and down, now focusing on Jasper's face, now on what little she could spy of the catalogue.
When Jasper had shown no reaction, Mrs. Oliver had come up with a new tactic. One day when he showed up on the field of honor, Jasper looked across and, to his vast surprise, found no one opposite. Instead, a few minutes later he saw his neighbor's door open. She emerged dressed in an ancient cloth overcoat, bag in hand, and set off down the street at a prim crawl. It was an extreme ploy.
Jasper couldn't remember her ever leaving the confines of her house and yard. Everything she needed had been delivered. Burning with curiosity, Jasper had waited at the window until she had returned an hour or so later with a package in one hand and had let herself back into the house. But her window had remained vacant for the rest of the day. Jasper had had to wait until the following morning for the unveiling of her secret weapon.
It had turned out to be field glasses.
They were enormous, and from that point on Jasper had great difficulty in remaining at his station. While he turned the pages and tried to concentrate on the descriptions of plants and seeds, he could imagine what she must be seeing. In those glasses each grizzly bristle of his beard must rise up like a pine trunk out of a plain; every pore in his nose must be a pit big enough for an elephant to drown in. "Damn her eyes," he repeated over and over again as he tried to rock slowly and calmly, and not like a car trying to spin out of mud. He said that until he realized that she might be able to read his lips and tell that she was getting to him. Then it was twice as hard.
And then he got his second idea. He started to grow a beard. In spots. Each morning he would not shave a certain spot. As the days passed that spot of hair would grow longer and longer, and then he would start on another spot. After about ten days his face looked so strange he had trouble recognizing himself in the mirror. He didn't suppose it did much good, but it made him feel as though he were covered, and it gave her something ridiculous to look at. She didn't show a sign of anything. Mrs. Oliver just keep looking at him through the field glasses, and there was no telling what she thought.
So each day Jasper would sit there till he heard the rattle of the mailbox about eleven. The days slowly warmed into late April, and each day he would examine the mail, but it would contain nothing but circulars and magazines and bills.
One day, though, finally, there was a packet too, Burpee Seeds it said on the outside. Jasper hurried back into the house and over to the chair — she was still in hers across the way. He sat down. With trembling fingers, not caring if his excitement showed, he opened the package, and as he did so he could feel the worm beginning to turn.
He got it open and looked up. Mrs. Oliver's window was positively ballooning outward. It looked as though she were kneeling on the sill, her field glasses buried in the windowpane, her sharp little blue eyes enormously firing out of the two great tubes which were like twin cannon. Jasper didn't care. He let her see: Burpee Prize Giant Sunflower Seeds said each of the twelve little envelopes. He raised his head and grinned at her, rose, and pulled down the shade as hard as he could. He stood there in the semi-darkness of the musty room breathing hard, and then he began waiting for the next morning.
At nine o'clock sharp Jasper emerged from the house carrying the seeds. He went around in back to the shed, got out some gardening equipment, and brought it to the side of the house. Then he set to work while Cora Oliver sat and watched. He spaded and broke up the turf, mixed it with peat moss and fertilizer, raked it smooth, then with a narrow trowel he made a series of small holes, arranging them in seven or eight staggered rows which extended from three feet beyond one side of the window to three feet beyond the other side. He hoarded each trowel full of dirt in a cardboard box which he dragged along the ground with him as he crawled about. By the time he had finished, Jasper was aching in every joint. But it didn't matter. For the first time he was actually enjoying the feeling that Widow Oliver was watching him.
Then he went back over the route, dropped a seed into each hole which he filled with soil from his box, and tamped it down with his toe. Last of all he got out the hose and sprayed his little border garden. Each morning thereafter he watered the seeds until they sprouted. On that day, after he'd given his sproutlings their drink, Jasper sat in the window and drank a beer. With every sip he raised the can and toasted the old lady who did not respond, but only sat in her window peering out at him from her aquarium like some hoary fish that had swallowed a diver and stolen his goggles.
Jasper chuckled to himself. "You know as well as I, now," he mouthed silently across at her. "All we have to do is wait," and he toasted her again. She did nothing, but Jasper thought he might have spotted the wraith of a smile on her sallow chops. The possibility disturbed him, but the sun pouring in the window warmed and soothed him, and for the first time in three years he dozed off in his chair.
By the time the sunflowers reached the level of the sill, Jasper had a good growth of beard. Slowly, day by day, the plants inched upward, up at last to the lowest pane of the window. He could see the buds swelling at the tops of the sturdy stalks. The sunlight and the rain came down on the plants, and the green things absorbed both greedily in their fair lunge into the air. The taller they grew the more it seemed to Jasper that his beard itched. Then the plants were as tall as the second pane, and some of the shorter ones burst into bloom. The great dark eyes opened and surrounded themselves with aureoles of golden petals. The flowers stared across at Widow Oliver on her love seat, and for the first time Jasper sensed that she wavered, for a glass eye is no match for the eye of a flower, he thought.
At last the day came when the fringes of petals tipped upward into the line of vision that pinned Jasper and Cora Oliver on its opposite poles. On that day Jasper brought a steaming basin of water to the window, a towel, his razor, and a mug of soap, and he began to shave. He used the window as a mirror, for the plants cast a shadow upon it, and in the pane he could make out his image enough to do a clean job. He had to use three blades, but he worked slowly and tried not to hurt himself tugging. Cora Oliver peered at him till he had finished and stood wiping his face, which felt tender and unprotected now. Then he straightened and stared across at her over the sea of dark and golden flowers.
"So long, old woman," he said, not using his voice but only his lips. "I wish I could say it's been nice seeing you," and he grinned.
The woman did not move for a time, then she brought her glasses down and put them on the love seat beside her. There was something peculiar about her expression, Jasper could tell. At first he thought it might be anger or frustration, but then he realized he was wrong. It was a look more on the order of sadness, but sadness mixed with a thing he could only call hilarity. She shook her head from side to side, slowly, and said something he couldn't get. He looked hard. She repeated it. From what he could make out she was saying something like, "More's the pity, you old fool." But he couldn't be sure. And then she reached up and pulled her shade.
Jasper sat down in his rocker. He was tired, and he felt good for having won, but something bothered him, and the room, looming dark and gray out of its corners stacked with magazines and catalogues, out of the dust and the old furniture, felt chilly for late June.
And then he figured out what Cora must have meant. What would happen when the plants were tall enough to block the window and the sunlight entirely? He looked at them through the pane. Jasper nodded slowly, staring. It was a long time till fall. The flowers nodded back.
As soon as he woke up he remembered the last thing that had happened before he lost consciousness. He had been sitting in his favorite chair in front of the television set watching the evening news. His wife had been sitting on the sofa watching as well in the parlor of their second-floor flat in the house that they had bought late in their lives and marriage. The news wasn’t good — was it ever? — but he and his wife were comfortable for the first time in their lives, and had been for several years of his retirement as pastor of the First Italian Baptist Church. They had lived in this small Connecticut city since 1939; their children had grown up and gone, gotten married themselves, one lived nearby — a toolmaker for Pratt & Whitney, the other in upstate New York — a college professor. The professor, the older boy, was the one he’d wanted to be a minister too, but that was not to be.
He remembered the sudden sharp pain in his chest, falling forward out of his chair, hitting the floor and then nothing until he had awakened.
No, that wasn’t right. He awoke, and still there was nothing.
There was no light, if he had eyes, only darkness. He saw nothing, he felt nothing, if he had fingers to feel with; he heard nothing — there was nothing to hear or, apparently, with which to hear. He could not breathe, nor did he need to even had there been something to breathe. He did not understand how he was able to think, if he were, indeed, thinking.
He lay awhile (was he “lying”?) attempting to do the things he remembered he used to do. He tried to shout, but he could make no sound, couldn’t have heard it if he had made one, had no mouth with which to utter anything. All he could do was recollect, feel as though he were going mad, experience despair and frustration for — how long?
The conclusion he reached was inevitable and inescapable: he had died in his parlor while watching the evening news on NBC. Until that moment he had been certain that when he died something would happen. He would awaken to the Life Beyond. He would be ushered into the Presence of his Maker. Glory would abound. Something certainly would happen, not nothing. It was impossible for Nothing to happen! Or, if it did, it would be impossible for him to experience it. He would simply be nothing.
Or had the ancient Greeks gotten it right? Was this Erebus? Was this the pure darkness of Tartarus, of the Underworld where the lost souls go to “live” in emptiness, without hope? When he was a boy living in Sicily, which the Greeks had colonized centuries before his own people, the Turks, had conquered that island, he had from time to time heard snippets and shards of Greek mythology. He had heard about Erebus and wondered about it.
And as a member of an unobserving Roman Catholic family, long before his conversion to Waldensian Protestantism, he had wondered about Purgatory. Had the Church adopted the Greeks’ Erebus, as they had adopted so many other things from paganism, like holidays and saints? Was this, then, Purgatory, which would prove that his concept of the afterlife had been erroneous, and his life, consequently, had been useless? What there was left of him, here, in this all-consuming darkness, despaired.
Would there be no end to this nothingness? Would there be no union with the Godhead, no reunions with those he had left behind, those who had preceded him? He tried to put out feelers, tentacles from his mind to test the blankness engulfing him. He felt that he would go mad, that he would like to go mad because he could not bear this soulless emptiness any longer. And how long had it been? It felt as though it had been eternal.
He could not believe it when he woke up again. But had he awakened? What was all this light?
"I hate my name," Gladys told him after three drinks at the singles bar where they had just met. She was blonde and he was breathing hard, but it was clear that all she wanted to do was talk. They were all like that with him — at least the pretty ones.
"I'll find you the perfect new name," Mike said, "one that will suit your personality to a T." He took off his glasses to wipe the steam from them. The light was blue in the bar, and that was the way he felt.
"How?" Gladys was beginning to appear interested. She twiddled the swizzle stick in her drink and lifted her gaze from his paunch to his eyes.
"On the main frame parallel computers at Megatronics! I'm a programmer. But this is going to take some time and research," he said, trying to veil the glint of hope in his eyes. "I'll have to ask you some questions. Don't worry!" he hastened to say further, "It won't be much worse than joining a computer match club." In the pause that followed Mike could almost hear the tension that sizzled above the tables and booths of The Blue Martinis Lounge.
"You promise?" she asked at last.
Mike nodded his head so hard that drops of perspiration fell from his forehead onto the bar counter. He moved his arm as unobtrusively as he could to wipe them up with his sleeve. "When I've found you the perfect name you can have your old one changed legally."
"Okay. What do you want to know?"
Mike pulled out the pad and mechanical pencil he always carried, and he took notes until the wee hours. They finished just as the Lounge and Gladys' eyes were closing. "Drive you home?" he asked.
"No, thanks. I'll grab a cab." She picked up her purse and teetered to her feet. She gestured to the barkeep who reached for the phone.
"Well, how about we meet here in a week, next Friday? I ought to be done by then." She nodded vaguely. Mike hoped she would remember.
Over the rest of the weekend, and during all his spare time the rest of the week, Mike worked fiendishly on the program. It was as though he were inspired, under a spell — he had never worked better.
"I'd give anything to make this work," he muttered over and over under his breath as his pencil sped over the paper and his fingers poked at the keyboard. Mr. Harris, his boss, seemed impressed by his newly-found industry.
When Mike was done writing the program he fed every fact and statistic of Gladys' life into the company machine. In return the computer eventually came up with the perfect new name: "Laborna." Mike hoped like the devil that she would be grateful.
It turned out she was more than that, for when he met her at The Blue Martinis and pronounced the syllables of her new name she went stare-eyed, entranced. That weekend she did everything Mike asked — everything. With a passion. At her place.
It wasn't long before Mike realized he had discovered Gladys' Secret Name, and that the program he had written had made him her absolute master. "For Heaven's sake!" he said. "I wonder if it would work on any of the other girls."
He began to collect information from the personnel files at the company. It took a lot of overtime, but that looked good to Mr. Harris. When Mike had finished, he began to feed the data into the machine. Soon he had computed the Secret Name of every secretary in his department. And in every case all he had to do was to pronounce the appropriate syllables to make each of them his love slave.
All the heavy activity, both physical and mental, took its toll. While he was on sick leave Mike began to realize what a fool he'd been, though, to tell the truth, it had been worth it. He had enjoyed to the hilt the turnabout in the way the men at the office regarded him. Mike had gone in a stroke from wimp to superstud.
Nobody could understand it. Mike had basked for weeks in the envious and malicious stares of his fellow toilers as he walked among the desks with their flickering screens and humming printers.
It was only after he'd computed the Secret Name of Mr. Harris and received two quick and furiously discussed promotions that it began to dawn on Mike that he'd been frittering away the greatest discovery in the history of mankind. He thought that if word got out about his program — which Mike could not allow — he would receive the Nobel Prize. "In fact," he said to himself, "I'll make sure I get it anyway."
When he was back on his feet he began to proceed carefully and methodically with a plan he'd worked out in the hospital. Soon he was well on his way to ruling the world.
One day Mike was sitting in the Oval Office of the White House considering his next move. He'd been ruling the world for quite a while, but it still felt very good. He enjoyed the feeling of plush under his feet, the silent movements of the servants, the shine of the brass on the shoulders of the guards at the door. All this was too fine to lose, so Mike spent a great deal of time considering and reconsidering what he had to do to keep things going smoothly. He knew he had plenty of enemies who were waiting and looking for his weak spot. It was very annoying. It distracted him from his pleasure.
"Great bleeding Beelzebub!" he cried suddenly, overwhelmed by his blindness. "Defense!" How was it he hadn't thought of it before? It wasn't possible to control every individual in the world, so he ruled by controlling key people. "But what if someone from somewhere comes up with my own program? He could counter my power by discovering my Secret Name! I don't even know what it is myself!"
Even as he breathed the words Mike headed for the computer room trailing a double-timing cordon of colonels and generals behind him down the elegant White House corridors.
Into the machine — top of the line — Mike fed every fact and statistic of his being. Not even pausing to wipe the fog from his lenses, he pushed the Return key. Out of the printer there issued a single word, a name. Mike stared at it for a moment, then he cried, with wonder ringing in his voice, "Lafnot!"
Immediately there appeared before him in a cloud of fire a demon conjured by the syllables he had uttered. Mike gasped, "Well, I'll be damned!"
The Virginia Quarterly Review "The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).
The Tower Journal Two short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.
The Tower Journal A story, "The Car," and two poems, "Fathers" and "Year by Year"
The Tower Journal Memoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.
The Michigan Quarterly Review This is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).
The Gawain Poet An essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.
The Black Death Bryan Bridges' interesting article on the villanelle and the terzanelle with "The Black Death" by Wesli Court as an example of the latter.
Seniority: Six Shakespearian Tailgaters This is a part of a series called "Gnomes" others of which have appeared in TRINACRIA and on the blog POETICS AND RUMINATIONS.
Reinventing the Wheel, Modern Poems in Classical Meters An essay with illustrations of poems written in classical meters together with a "Table of Meters" and "The Rules of Scansion" in the Summer 2009 issue of Trellis Magazine
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